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Novels and Novelists

A Foreign Novel

A Foreign Novel

Jenny — By Sigrid Undset

Of course we know a great deal better, and laugh at our emotion and refer to it as a foolish weakness on the part of our poor dear heart—who is like the timid old-fashioned wife of that brilliant young surgeon, the mind—but for all that, there is something in the opera ‘La Bohème’ that sets us sighing…. Yes, yes, of course it was an impossible, unhealthy, draughty life, with all those stairs, and no electric light, and no bathroom, and no cooked vegetables! But the white walls, the bunch of violets in a glass, the long loaf and the bottle of wine in a cupboard, her hat and his coat hanging from two nails…. Sentimental nonsense—but there you are!

The author of ‘Jenny’ has managed to capture this pale lilac sunlight, this youthful atmosphere so successfully that the glaring faults of construction are toned down. Her small group of Scandinavian students living in Rome, care-free, spending whole nights talking and whole days taking their fill of the sun and painting and eating and falling in and out of love, is excellently described. She can bring them together round a café table and make us realize how they are related to one another, how they react and respond, the quality of their group emotion; and she can part them, separate them, follow them one by one to that lighted attic where, solitary, they reveal the self that does not change. We are made to feel how the two women, Jenny and Cesca, for all that they are more important, richer, more sensitive than the men, are yet at the mercy of life, are in danger, just because they are women. And yet the book fails as a whole because Miss Undset has been content, as page 233 it were, to uncover rather than discover Jenny. We should have known at the end why it was that, in giving herself to the man who she felt would be for ever a stranger, Jenny sins against the deepest impulses of her being—why, from that moment, Life would have nothing more to do with her. But this question, problem, which should be the living support of the novel, the author forgets, or allows to be smothered.

(July 30, 1920.)